


Piano Keys, Cigarettes and Gold

by Exterminatorviolence



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Angst, M/M, Ray-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-16 02:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3470279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Exterminatorviolence/pseuds/Exterminatorviolence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray thinks and dreams in colors and he loves it.</p><p>He's had this weird ability all his life. Synesthesia is what his doctors told him it was; the ability to see different colors associated with his senses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piano Keys, Cigarettes and Gold

**Author's Note:**

> There was a boy named Evan who I fell in love with oh, five years ago now? It all hurts all the time now and I miss him terribly. This is how I feel about him and how I think about him now, and I do have synesthesia and I see colors when I hear things and sometimes when I smell and taste things, so every color described is what I see.
> 
> It just feels good to finally let it all out.

Ray thinks and dreams in colors. Colors and shapes that swirl behind his eyelids. The jagged sharp yellow lines he sees when his history teacher, Mr. Ramsey, laughs or the robin egg blue he sees when he smells the grass after rain.

Ray thinks and dreams in colors and he _loves_ it.  
\-----  
He's had this weird ability all his life. Synesthesia is what his doctors told him it was; the ability to see different colors associated with his senses.  
\-----  
When he was six, he thought being able to see colors was cool, told everyone at his school. They all believed him and soon everyone was asking him what color their voice was and what shape he saw and it all become overwhelming for the young boy.

He didn't tell anyone else about his ability after that.  
\-----  
The next person he told was his best friend, Michael, when they are fourteen.

"So you just, see colors?" Michael is partly curious and partly amused.

Ray nods, hands fiddling with each other. "Yeah. You, you don't have to believe me or anything. I haven't exactly told anyone in, like, eight years,"

Michael’s eyebrows furrow, “Why wouldn't I believe you? You’re one of my best friends, of course I believe you. So what color is my voice?”

“Like a metallic blue. You’re all straight edges and the metallic shows more when you’re shouting.” Ray’s eyes are closed, the colors forming as he describes them; the straight thick lines that shoot across his vision, crisscrossing with each other and getting closer together the louder Michael talks.

When he opens his eyes, Michael’s staring at him with wonder in his eyes. “Does Gavin have a color too? Does it change with different accents?”

“I don’t know. I've never seen the same color twice, so I wouldn't know if voices change with accents. But Gavin’s voice is green, like pine needle green that fall in drops. If you guys are talking together, your lines cross through Gavin’s drops and make them split and splash around.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that this is like the coolest thing ever?” Michael is smiling and soon is asking him what other people’s colors are. And Ray’s smiling too, happy that someone else knows his secret and isn't being sarcastic or calling Ray a liar. Ray thinks that him and Michael will be friends for a very, very long time.  
\-----  
Two weeks later he meets a seventeen year old named Joel Heyman. They meet through Gavin at some after school club he dragged Ray to. The first time they meet, Ray thinks Joel’s neurotic and maybe just a little too obsessed with the gold market for someone who’s only seventeen.

Joel’s a mess though; coming from a broken home with too many brothers and sisters. He smokes a pack a day and he thinks he won’t live past the age of thirty. At first, Ray wanted to fix him, wanted to glue all his pieces back together to make a whole person again. Somewhere between him trying to fix Joel and realizing he couldn't, he fell in love. And he knows that Joel was in love with him too at some point.

They try dating, twice, for five months in total, and Ray was happy. They were both happy. There were late night phone calls lasting hours at a time and Ray never got tired from hearing Joel’s voice, always doing some stupid accent to make him laugh.

Joel goes to a carnival on a humid June day, Ray refusing to go because hello, his parents definitely wouldn't like him going to a carnival out in the “stoner park”, but he tells Joel to have fun anyway. And when the sun is starting to set and turn the sky pink, Joel turns up at Ray’s house, holding a bag of pink and blue cotton candy knowing Ray doesn't like it but knowing that he’d appreciate the cliche of it. He’s right. And Ray ends up eating the cotton candy anyway.

(And if Ray and Joel make a heart out of cotton candy that ends up being Ray’s background for the next couple of months, well, Michael only teases him a little bit because of it.)

And yeah, it was Ray who broke it off both times, but he had too. He was self destructing himself and he needed time to figure out what was going on and how to stop it.

Ray was _\-- is_ , still in love with him and he and Joel still talked and were close, maybe a little too close for _just friends_. But Ray was happy and the communication he got from Facebook messaging and the occasional late night phone call was all worth it. Even if he had to listen about Joel’s latest sex escapades.

“If I ever get married,” Ray begins on one of the rare times they’re on the phone. “Would you --”

“Wait, if you get married to someone who _isn't_ me?” Joel interrupts. And Ray laughs a little, more bitter than happy though.

“Okay, if I ever get married to someone who _isn't_ you, would you be one of my Groomsmen?”

Ray can almost hear Joel thinking over the phone. “Yeah, I suppose I could. But if neither of us are married when you’re thirty five, we’re gonna get married, right?”

“Oh, yeah, totally,” Ray chuckles, genuine this time. “Thought you said you weren't gonna live past thirty though,”

“I would for you,” Joel says simply.

Ray coughs awkwardly, not really knowing what to say to that. A few minutes go by before he finally settles on, “Uh, so you know how we’re super close,” Joel makes a _hmmm_ noise. “I’m just, happy there’s not, like, any awkward unrequited feelings.” And Ray knows this is kind of cheating, but he needs to know.

“Well that’s not exactly true,” It’s quiet, but there.

And Ray wants to scream at Joel, feels the bitter hot sting of tears at the back of his eyes. “Ah, yeah, you can’t just say that,”

“You could give me another chance.”

“I _did_. I told you last summer that I thought I was still in love with you. Remember? Why the hell do you think I’m still here? Listening to your problems, trying to help you, trying to show you that you are loved.”

Joel chuckles a little. “Oh yeah. I think you’re better off without me anyway though.”

“No, wait Joel --” But Joel hangs up before Ray can get out the _I still love you_. “Goddammit.” Ray hisses and he throws his phone against his wall. His mom walks in a moment later, not saying anything, but just holding her son as his shoulders shake with sobs.  
\-----

Life goes on like that for the next couple of years - Ray listening to Joel’s problems, silently dying - until Michael invites a sixteen year old Ray and Gavin over for a “Lad Sleepover” where they inevitably get very, very drunk. Drunk off of the vodka and whiskey Gavin stole from his parents.

Ray’s never liked alcohol, but he’s pretty sad thinking about Joel and how he wants to go _grocery shopping with him_ and _fucking cook with him_ , and he hates it because it _hurts_. And he wants Joel to come over on _Thanksgiving_ to meet his family and have his family friend’s glare at him, silently judging him.

So he drinks. A lot. Maybe too much, but neither Gavin nor Michael try to stop him. At least, not until he starts babbling something about wanting to suck Joel’s dick. And then almost on cue, his phone beeps, and a sharp violet bursts in his mind, and he looks down to see he has another message from Joel so he clumsily goes to see it and he with his inhibitions lowered, he makes a mistake.

He _yells_ at Joel. Well, he yells as much as he can by typing messages on Facebook, telling him that he’s _still in love with the idiot_ , and that Joel’s _so fucking stupid because how can he not see that Ray’s still in love, has been for the last three years of his life._

But Joel _isn't good with emotions,_ and says he never knew and Ray thinks that’s bullshit so he tells him that _he’s had enough and that he’s sick of it and that Joel can have fun with his own broken life and he wishes Joel all the luck in the world to find someone who will listen to all his bullshit problems willingly because he’s done._

Michael tells him that he doesn't think it was a mistake, but Ray knows it was because he still misses Joel three months later and he’s scared that he’s never gonna see the idiot again. Hell, he thinks sometimes he would move to Austin, Texas from the small town he lives now that’s located just outside of the city on the off chance that he might see Joel’s stupid face again.

They’re both self destructive, building themselves up so high just to fall back down into the broken pieces of glass they started out as. And he can’t help but wonder that if they were together, if they’d complete each other or completely destroy each other.  
And for now...For now he can’t forget the way Joel sounds or how he smells or how he tastes. He doesn't think he ever will.

\-----  
Sometimes the colors become too much, and he’ll confuse colors with emotions and soon his whole head will be filled with the deep wine red of his blood and all he’ll hear is the matte gray humming in the back of his head. It causes him to self destruct until he’s just laying in bed, refusing to move because _what’s the point?_ That scratching and humming won’t ever leave and that wine red color fills his entire vision until there’s no room for any other colors but the color of his own despair.

Ray’s history teacher, Mr. Ramsey, saves his life a year later. He becomes one of Ray’s closest friends. So when the colors become too much, he hides in his teacher’s classroom trying not to scratch at his arms or scream because _everything hurts all the time now._

His teacher asks him to paint out what he hears and sees because maybe it would help, and he shows Ray bands and singers to listen to that he could paint if only to get it all out.

And so he paints. Paints the music and what he sees. And at first it’s all wine reds and blacks that cover the canvas; colors that he sees in his twisted, backwards mind. He paints the black and white of the humming that he hears all the time until the scratching and humming slowly fade away.

When he starts listening to the bands his teacher show him, the colors turn from wine red into swirling deep blues of the singer’s voice laced with the light beige of the guitar strings that vibrate in his mind. And it does help him in the end. It helps him cope when the colors get too vibrant, giving him headaches that last for days.

And now his teacher gives him a high five every year after some stupid joke that Ray made where he said his New Year's Resolution was going to be to stay alive until next year.

One day, on a Friday, Ray brings his teacher a painting that has swirling piano key white flowing, free form across the canvas, almost glowing gold around them. All the negative space is filled with cigarette ash gray, flecks of black hidden beneath the first layers of paint. Ray’s eyes are red rimmed.

“Who is this? Another song?” His teacher asks, holding the painting out in front of him. It’s still drying, the gray paint still gleaming a little from the wet paint.

Ray licks his lips before answering, “It’s, uh, Joel… I can’t get him out of my head. Ever.”

His teacher remembers Joel, one of the only kids to actually drop out of high school. Hell, all the teachers remember him, and almost all the students do too.

His eyes flick  to Ray’s arms and he notices that he’s wearing long sleeves again. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Ray takes a shuddering breath before nodding and setting his bag down to sit in a chair across from his teacher. Mr. Ramsey carefully sets the painting down on his desk, making sure to not get any dust or papers stuck to it and settles down to listen to the boy.  
\------  
Ray thinks and dreams in colors. Colors and shapes that swirl behind his eyelids; like the piano key white that swirls across his eyelids, the smell of cigarette ash that’s still stuck on _his_ hoodie. And when he wakes up, he wakes up with the taste of gold on his lips.

Ray thinks dreams in colors and he _hates_ it.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Comments and kudos make my world go round.  
> Follow me on tumblr! exterminatorviolence.tumblr.com


End file.
